Thoughts on Life, Love, Politics, Hypocrisy and Coming Out in Mid-Life

Sunday, September 04, 2016

America's Broken Political Sysytem

With some of the latest polls showing Hillary Clinton's lead over Donald Trump narrowing, some wonder how our political system became so broken that a reality TV, carnival barker could ever have secured the Republican Party nomination, much less be running as strongly as he is when his message is one of hate, fear, and misogyny. A piece in Salon looks at the scary situation and places the blame on two sources: (i) the Republican Party's broken nominating process, and (ii) the media and its obsession with false equivalency and hesitancy to report the truth, and willingness to allow itself to be duped by right wing pundits and others. To these factors, I would add the GOP's deliberate courting of Christofascists and then allowing them to be admitted to and eventually hijack the party base. Here are article excerpts:

And the GOP nominee hasn’t really done anything specific to
warrant such a change in fortunes. In fact, he’s done almost everything wrong
by a factor of thousands. This speaks volumes about the malfunctioning
condition of American politics and the news media, and I’m afraid that all of
the garment rending over Trump’s individual hourly trespasses is serving to
avoid the big picture crisis: Trump shouldn’t even be in the race, much less
nearly tied with a far more qualified opponent. He’s marched through a
super-colossal loophole in the system, bobby-pins and border walls in tow,
while doing everything wrong.

After watching Donald Trump yelling at the world about
immigration Wednesday night, I’m more discouraged than ever about the current
state of the American political process. How could this have possibly gone so
far? Are we really this vulnerable to the whimsy of necrotic populism? Sadly,
we are, and there are scant firewalls to prevent it from happening again and
again.

In case you missed it,
Trump’s whiplash posture — one minute “softening,” the next minute going fullHulk Smash! — was on unavoidable display Wednesday,
beginning with his awkward meeting with Mexican President Peña Nieto and
concluding with what was supposed to be a major policy address, but which ended
up being one of the most horrifying presidential-level speeches ever recorded.
In addition to the apocalyptic hatred and loudness of Trump’s rant, it was, of
course, loaded with terrible speechwriting, joined by outright fiction.

Simply put: Trump is an
embarrassment to civilization. A crackpot who exploited a broken party and a
broken nominating process to threaten the world. If Trump’s brand of
undisciplined pandering and screechy malevolence ever becomes the standard for
American politics, I don’t want any part of it. I can’t repeat this enough:
We’re on the brink of disaster, with roughly five percentage points separating
us from Trump and the abyss. . . . Unless something’s done to fix
it, we could permanently become a nation that elects despots and freaks similar
to the Republican nominee.

Within our present system, a reality-show demagogue can
parlay his tabloid popularity into a run for president. He can win the
nomination by appealing to the basest, cruelest, most simplistic instincts of
reactionary voters who are too ignorant and lazy to understand the wonky details
of public policy and who are mostly brainwashed from within an impermeable
bubble in which a limitless geyser of misinformation and propaganda, carefully
designed and crafted to tap into the reptilian brains of the poorly educated
and easily influenced, has successfully deceived enough voters to openly
support this destructive character.

He can literally
sidestep every standard by which all other candidates are expected to achieve,
and the news media, along with a frustratingly large chunk of the voting public,
will give him a pass anyway. Again, he can say a million things that no other
candidate could possibly get away with, and never has, and because the news
media has been rendered flaccid before the false accusation of liberal bias,
the existential threat he poses — the urgent relating of facts that’d easily
disqualify him — takes a back seat to horse-race narratives and smirky
roundtables in which, inexplicably, Bill Kristol, who’s always wrong about
everything, pops up on the liberal network. . . . Yet qualifications and
conspicuously vast differences are irrelevant when there’s an equivalence quota
to fill on cable news.

Even though the
Democrats still have a superdelegate firewall, and, by the way, the electoral
college was designed by the Framers in part to expressly stymie outlier
candidates, the GOP nominating process is without a mechanism to prevent
another Trump from getting this far despite himself. The Republican Party needs
to devise a firewall now. I mean, right fucking now. If nothing else, Trump’s
success underscores how the superdelegate system and the electoral college as
they exist today are, obviously, crucial to the future of democracy.

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Out gay attorney in a committed relationship; formerly married and father of three wonderful children; sometime activist and political/news junkie; survived coming out in mid-life and hope to share my experiences and reflections with others.
In the career/professional realm, I am affiliated with Caplan & Associates PC where I practice in the areas of real estate, estate planning (Wills, Trusts, Advanced Medical Directives, Financial Powers of Attorney, Durable Medical Powers of Attorney); business law and commercial transactions; formation of corporations and limited liability companies and legal services to the gay, lesbian and transgender community, including birth certificate amendment.

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